§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising. In particular, the present invention concerns tracking ad selection and ad performance.
§1.2 Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it may be very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Advertisers have developed several strategies in an attempt to maximize the value of such advertising. In one strategy, advertisers use popular presences or means for providing interactive media or services (referred to as “Websites” in the specification without loss of generality) as conduits to reach a large audience. Using this first approach, an advertiser may place ads on the home page of the New York Times Website, or the USA Today Website, for example. In another strategy, an advertiser may attempt to target its ads to narrower niche audiences, thereby increasing the likelihood of a positive response by the audience. For example, an agency promoting tourism in the Costa Rican rainforest might place ads on the ecotourism-travel subdirectory of the Yahoo Website. An advertiser will normally determine such targeting manually.
Regardless of the strategy, Website-based ads (also referred to as “Web ads”) are often presented to their advertising audience in the form of “banner ads”—i.e., a rectangular box that includes graphic components. When a member of the advertising audience (referred to as a “viewer” or “user” in the specification without loss of generality) selects one of these banner ads by clicking on it, embedded hypertext links typically direct the viewer to a page on the advertiser's Website (referred to as an “ad landing page” or simply a “landing page”). This process, wherein the viewer selects an ad, is commonly referred to as a “click-through” (“Click-through” is intended to cover any user selection.). The ratio of the number of click-throughs to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is rendered) is commonly referred to as the “click-through rate” of the ad.
A “conversion” is said to occur when a user consummates a transaction related to a previously served ad. What constitutes a conversion may vary from case to case and can be determined in a variety of ways. For example, it may be the case that a conversion occurs when a user clicks on an ad, is referred to the advertiser's web page, and consummates a purchase there before leaving that Web page. Alternatively, a conversion may be defined as a user being shown an ad, and making a purchase on the advertiser's Web page within a predetermined time (e.g., seven days). In yet another alternative, a conversion may be defined by an advertiser to be any measurable/observable user action such as, for example, downloading a white paper, navigating to at least a given depth of a Website, viewing at least a certain number of Web pages, spending at least a predetermined amount of time on a Website or Web page, registering with a Website, etc. Often, if user actions don't indicate a consummated purchase, they may indicate a sales lead, although user actions constituting a conversion are not limited to this. Indeed, many other definitions of what constitutes a conversion are possible. The ratio of the number of conversions to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed) is commonly referred to as the conversion rate. If a conversion is defined to be able to occur within a predetermined time since the serving of an ad, one possible definition of the conversion rate might only consider ads that have been served more than the predetermined time in the past.
The serving of ads can be priced in various ways. Common examples include cost per impression (CPI) and cost per action (CPA), where “action” refers to some desired activity of the user such as selecting (or clicking) the ad, purchasing a product, signing up for a service, or some other “conversion.” Initially, online advertising was generally priced per impression (e.g., per thousand impressions). However, pricing schemes which more closely align online advertising costs with the desired results of the advertiser (e.g., having a user visit the advertiser's Website, having a user consummate a commercial transaction on the advertiser's Website, etc.) have become more popular. To track user selections (clicks), the links in some ads may include links that first direct the user's content rendering application (e.g., a browser) to one or more intermediate resources or servers (e.g., using one or more URLs). These servers associated with intermediate URLs (simply referred to as “intermediate URL servers” without loss of generality) can direct the user's content rendering application (e.g., a browser) to a server that can record the selection (click event) before forwarding the user's content rendering application to a subsequent server (which may be the server storing the ad landing page). Note that in addition to tracking selections for billing purposes, selections can be used to derive ad performance metrics. Such metrics may be used for various purposes such as positioning ads or applying relative rendering attributes, ad campaign assistance, governing the serving of ads, etc. As can be appreciated from the foregoing, there is a need for methods and apparatus that allow clicks to be tracked. Moreover, such tracking should support performance monitoring, perhaps supporting rich levels of performance monitoring.